10 – Not All Mandroids

In which Phoenix has nothing on Jamie Madrox when it comes to retcons, Pterosaurs have super punchable faces, Colossus gets laid, we are uninterested in the Savage Land, Wolverine and Storm are both pretty interesting, smiling costs extra if you’re Doctor Doom, Banshee saves the day, Alpha Flight tries, Angry Hovercraft Guy comes back, and Proteus is fairly upsetting.

X-Plained:

X-Men #109, 114-16, 118-122, and 125-128

Multiple Man

Metacontinuity

The Savage Land

Pterosaurs

Shi’ar mustache technology

Karl Lykos

Misty Knight

Colleen Wing

Wolverine in Japan

Mandroids

Moses Magnum

A Heist

Angus McWhirter, disgruntled hovercraft rental guy

Alpha Flight

Team Dynamics

Why you always leave a note

Proteus

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

10 comments

Proteus DID come back during the Necrosha cross-over. He takes over Destiny’s corpse, Blindfold, Husk, and a host of other X-Men before Magneto “reached into Preoteus’s energy matrix and CHANGED it” which made him of course, dissipate into electrons and leave his death open to a future Proteus story.

While this is certainly a niche subject matter (though one with a surprisingly large audience) the quality of your production and performance truly transcends narrow categories. The podcast is both as exhaustive and as facile as an introduction to a highly convoluted subject matter can get, The format of each show is is intelligent and tightly organized yet still leaving space for riffing and improvisation. You two are just awesome and highly entertaining. Your podcasts are the perfect meld of graduate level dissertation and stand up act. I love what you are doing, would like to see you revisit and discuss the Steranko and Neal Adams issues eventually, but otherwise I am so happy to be along for the ride.
Totally tangential, but I would love to see you tackle the the new Star Wars movies!

Um…in our world Inverness is not the fourth largest city in Scotland, that would be Dundee. It’s not the fifth either, that might be Stirling, it’s certainly bigger than Inverness.
No offence to Inverness, a place I have some amazingly happy memories of, but in our world it’s not even a close thing. In the 1970s Inverness had a population of about 35,000, while Dundee was about 185,000.
Cyke should have maybe asked the Scot in the party.

Proteus also came back in that Harness/Piecemeal mess and in the Star Trek/X-Men crossover, which seemed a much better fit–as Proteus kinda smacks of old ST:TOS omnipotent-yet-confused antagonists–and which gave us that wonderful double Dr. McCoys panel. Weird cross-company crossovers! Maybe review that Teen Titans/X-Men one?

Also, super weird that Moira kept her married name. Why not go back to Moira Kinross? There are plenty of reasons a woman *might* choose to keep her married name after a divorce, but none seem relevant to Moira. Die again, Joe MacTaggart!

And while I’m replying to a 4-month-old post (y’know, as one does), can we resolve to be fearless in the face of Claremont fetishes? Let’s talk about Piotr’s three-way. Let’s talk about weird Victorian-era naked human hunting. Let’s talk about CC’s fascination with an innocent ideal of free love a la Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. Is it open-minded or just ewgross? Reading it at a young age, I found it fearless, as any challenge to current societal norms of sexuality tend to be met with outright scorn–orientation, sure, but also exploration, flexible boundaries, non-traditional relationships, etc. Piotr’s puritanical views are directly challenged with, “Where’s the harm? This is how we choose to express ourselves.” I feel like Chris did some solid work in putting these ideas into the ether, not saying too much, letting them evolve or not based on reader interest, and maybe being absorbed into the collective consciousness. Maybe.

I’ve mentioned this before but want to clarify again, since this seems like a context in which the line is likely to blur: we are 100% down with discussing motifs, but we draw a really serious line between discussing motifs in a writer’s work and speculating–outside of primary-source, publicly-available material–on that writer’s personal investment in those motifs; and that line applies to comment moderation as well.

(You’re fine, Justin – this is just a train of thought spinning out from your post.)